A power system generates electric power at one part of the system and transmits that power via a transmission corridor for use by another part of the system. The transmission corridor is considered to be stable in terms of voltage if the corridor maintains steady acceptable voltages not only under normal operating conditions but also after a disturbance to the system (e.g., a line outage). A voltage stable corridor therefore regains acceptable voltages after a disturbance, rather than oscillating or monotonically decreasing even in response to attempted voltage restoration mechanisms.
Transmission corridor voltage instability causes power blackouts and therefore has huge economic and societal costs. Known approaches to preventing blackouts monitor the corridor's real-time proximity to voltage instability and take appropriate control and protective actions as needed to mitigate system degradation or disturbance propagation. For example, such actions may include load shedding.
Many of these known approaches exploit the relation of the corridor's voltage instability to the power system's maximum loadability. In particular, the approaches identify the corridor's voltage instability as being strongly related to the inability of the combined generation and transmission parts of the system to provide the power requested by the receiving (i.e., load) part of the system. The approaches therefore employ a voltage instability criterion expressed directly or indirectly in terms of the system's maximum deliverable power, which is reached when the magnitude of the Thevenin equivalent impedance of the combined generation and transmission parts of the system equals the magnitude of the equivalent load impedance of the power receiving part: |ZTh|=|Zl|.
At least some of these approaches estimate the Thevenin equivalent impedance of the combined generation and transmission parts of the system in stages. Such multi-stage approaches involve estimating the power generating part's Thevenin equivalent. Some known techniques for “estimating” the power generating part's Thevenin equivalent simply assume that either the Thevenin equivalent voltage or impedance of the power generating part is known. See U.S. Pat. No. 7,200,500 B2, April 2007, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. Other techniques actually identify (i.e., track) the power generating part's Thevenin equivalent in the interest of accuracy, i.e., without making the above assumption. One such tracking technique performs recursive least squares using voltage and current phasor measurements taken at an interface between the power generating part and the transmission corridor. See U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,591 B1, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. To avoid delays associated with the recursive least squares technique, an alternative tracking technique separately updates the power generating part's Thevenin equivalent voltage and impedance. S. Corsi and G. N. Taranto, “A real-time voltage instability identification algorithm based on local phasor measurements,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 1271-1279, August 2008.